Quote

An artist's business is only to see.

Henry Adams

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Henry Adams
Age: 80 †
Born: 1838
Born: February 16
Died: 1918
Died: March 27
Historian
Historian Of The Modern Age
Journalist
Mathematician
Novelist
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Frances Snow Compton
Henry Adams
Business
Artist

More quotes by Henry Adams

Image
From earliest childhood the boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. Winter and summer, town and country, law and liberty, were hostile, and the man who pretended they were not, was in his eyes a schoolmaster -- that is, a man employed to tell lies to little boys.
Henry Adams
Image
My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River for the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog.
Henry Adams
Image
They know enough who know how to learn.
Henry Adams
Image
Unbroken Evolution under uniform conditions pleased every one -- except curates and bishops it was the very best substitute for religion a safe, conservative practical, thoroughly Common-Law deity.
Henry Adams
Image
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
Henry Adams
Image
The common view of marriage as a primitive institution implies in the man more than arbitrary superiority, such as he exercised over the child, which still remained free. The woman's slavery was assumed to be for life.
Henry Adams
Image
The world is coming to an end in 1950.
Henry Adams
Image
Any schoolboy could see that man as a force must be measured by motion, from a fixed point.
Henry Adams
Image
Man always made, and still makes, grotesque blunders in selecting and measuring forces, taken at random from the heap, but he never made a mistake in the value he set on the whole, which he symbolized as unity and worshipped as God. To this day, his attitude towards it has never changed, though science can no longer give to force a name.
Henry Adams
Image
You may cut off the heads of every rich man now living--of every statesman--every literary, and every scientific authority, without in the least changing the social situation. Artists, of course, disappeared long ago as social forces. So did the church. Corporations are not elevators, but levellers, as I see them.
Henry Adams
Image
Only on the edge of the grave can man conclude anything.
Henry Adams
Image
We shall some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have our religion and our immortality.
Henry Adams
Image
One sought not absolute truth. One sought only a spool on which to wind the thread of history without breaking it.
Henry Adams
Image
Man is an imperceptible atom always trying to become one with God.
Henry Adams
Image
The outline of the city became frantic in its effort to explain something that defied meaning. Power seemed to have outgrown its servitude and to have asserted its freedom. The cylinder had exploded, and thrown great masses of stone and steam against the sky.
Henry Adams
Image
The proper study of mankind is woman.
Henry Adams
Image
All State education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes.
Henry Adams
Image
History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.
Henry Adams
Image
As History stands, it is a sort of Chinese Play, without end and without lesson.
Henry Adams
Image
The People of Virginia declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression and that every.
Henry Adams